


Hear The Planets Singing Our Names

by RobinTrigue



Category: Interstellar (2014), World Wrestling Entertainment
Genre: Astronaut AU, Corn - Freeform, Gen, Multi, interstellar au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-10-06
Updated: 2016-10-06
Packaged: 2018-08-19 19:41:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8222579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RobinTrigue/pseuds/RobinTrigue
Summary: It’s the near future. A blight has come, ravaging the land. Humanity’s last hope rests on a single space mission, a quest to find a new home. But in order to complete the mission, everyone involved will have to decide what’s most important to them, and how willing they are to leave that behind.Frankly speaking, Brock Lesnar wishes he hadn’t been roped into flying this tin can with these overexcitable strangers. Surely saving humanity isn’t worth having to socialise with it?(This fic inspired by the question: what would happen if the movie Interstellar was not about Matthew McConaughey’s love for his daughter, but instead Brock Lesnar’s love of farming?)





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sanidine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sanidine/gifts).



_An elderly woman looks away from the camera, scowling at the soft light streaming in from the side as she twists her long grey and blue hair around a finger. “The wheat had died. A blight came and we had to burn it. We still had corn, we had acres of corn, but mostly we had dust,” she says. The interviewer mumbles a question, and she takes a moment to roll her eyes at the camera before continuing. “Oh, Brock was a farmer, like everybody else back then. Of course, he didn’t start that way...”_

***

Alexa Bliss banged on Brock’s door loudly. He opened the door, eyes dropping down to meet her glaring ones.

“Your damn dogs got into my yard,” she said angrily, gesturing to the dozen combines puttering behind her in a half-circle. “I’m going to go at their engines with a tire iron if it happens again, it’s the third time this week. My boys had to wipe ‘em and drive them all back one at a time. Don’t you know how to set a controller?”

Brock frowned at her, then stared at each of his machines in turn, wandering off the porch as he did so. “They’re good combines,” he said.

“Like fuck they are,” Alexa snorted behind him. “Your middle-aged pilot ass just doesn’t know shit about farming. Keep them on a leash or I’ll make you wish you did; they’re tearing up my land and I actually _care_ about my crops.”

Brock said nothing as his neighbour turned on her heel, marching the mile down the dirt road to the farmhouse she shared with two hulking teens, sons she’d had with her wife Nia. Nia lived far away now, teaching at the university. The teens were scared of Brock, but that was fine; he wasn’t one for socialising with his neighbours, or anyone. His large wooden farmhouse stood silent, just how he liked it: only himself, and the sounds of the plants and insects outside, the sounds of the winds coming down from the distant mountains, the creaks as the building settled into the accepting earth. And the sound of the dust storms. Those too.

His boots crunched softly along the layer of dust and dirt as he walked along the length of the first combine in the semicircle, checking it over for dents and rust, running a hand over the sun-baked metal. Some might have joked that he should have stayed in space, but the cold, dark, emptiness of space wasn’t the ‘alone’ that Brock craved. It was lifeless. There was nothing for him there. NASA had been a job to pay the bills until he could afford the farm he wanted. Now he had it.

He typed what he needed to into the combine’s GPS for it to understand its duties and sent it off, patting the cabin fondly before moving onto the next one. It trundled off, life-giving behemoth, leaving a trail of dust in its wake.

Brock frowned at the dust, coughing slightly as he re-programmed all the computers. He wasn’t sure how to feel about it. You didn’t expect this dirt that was giving you this food to turn on you like that and destroy you, but that’s what had happened. As a child, before the blight had come, Brock would spend hours running dirt through his fingers, getting to know every worm and grub and fungus that nurtured the earth which in turn nurtured him. He loved being a farmer: it was a life of ruthlessness towards the weeds and varmit that threatened his crops, every day ending in his hands black with soil and blister-covered as he fought nature’s invading forces. But the days were spent too getting to know each stalk of corn, running his fingers over every head of wheat to examine its grains, following his nose to find potential sources of rot and protect the plants that depended on him.

He’d kept growing wheat long after everyone else had stopped. It was a good plant, a plant with a long history of feeding man. It wasn’t its fault that its grains had withered on the stalk. But the city had petitioned until he’d burnt his field two years ago, stunted half-sprouts seeming to plead with him as they reached for the sun. Alexa and the others were now taking it up with City Hall that Brock burn his okra too. They spoke bitterly about the ground betraying them, about the dirt itself turning on humanity and causing this blight. It felt like sacrilege, to a farmer. But everyone else was a farmer too. Who knows.

They were saying on the radio that rice paddies were drying up too on the other side of the world, all the rice going sour and small, not enough nutrients to fill a belly. They were saying corn would be the only food left in the world a few harvests from now. But who knows.

Brock didn’t pretend to be an expert in world affairs, but he did know that come harvest time, too many insects stayed in the ground instead of flying out and singing their songs , continuing the cycle. Without new grubs in the roots, the soil was deteriorating. He did know there weren’t as many birds as there used to be, that the farm cats were ragged and scrawny from not having enough mice to chase through the fields. They said up north that the wolves were moving in closer to the cities, but they also said the wolves were dying out faster than they could breed.

This blight was bad for the land, and Brock couldn’t figure out what that meant, since the land was all there was. It was good planet, a fertile planet. Earth crumbled beneath your fingers and between your toes in the rainy summer storms. But the storms were coming less and less frequently. Trees kept being cleared to make way for more farmland, necessary since people had filled their farms so full with corn there was nowhere for the crops to rotate to. No trees holding the dirt down, you get dust. No roots keeping the water in. The world was separating into a sea of corn and a sea of salt. Brock looked over his swaying ocean, the pale green of the cornhusks and the darker corner where his okra withered. This was his land, good land. But the dust was making it sick and he wasn’t sure how to fix it. He listened to the land, but it wouldn’t tell him what it needed.

Brock arrived to his final harvester, the matriarch, a sturdy Gleaner with muddy chains hanging down from her back end. He climbed into the cab. Alexa had said she’d wiped all the controllers, but she must have forgotten this one; its home coordinates were set to someplace miles away, far to the west and south. A weird glitch. Brock wiped and reset it, only to have the glitch return. The third time it worked, the combine reluctantly accepting his input and moving to her position on the lower fields.

The sirens in town started up. Dust storm coming. The Bliss house started banging its shutters closed down the way. Brock’s windows were already closed; the house was too big for him to get to it all on short notice. The heat wasn’t so bad really, not when the generator pulled its weight and kept the fan downstairs working. Satisfied, Brock grunted and headed indoors, ready to settle down until the outside became habitable again.

***

He awoke the next morning to hear Alexa shouting “ _Lesnar, you piece of shit!_ ” at the top of her lungs. He peered around the edge of one curtain to see his neighbour stomping outside with a wooden club in her hand, brandishing it threateningly at the pair of combines that were currently driving deep grooves across her front lawn.  A third was cutting diagonally through the cornfield just in front.

Brock... was not overly fond of his neighbour Alexa.

Still, the wooden club would do no harm to his combines. Might as well let her get her rage out before he fetched them back. Maybe he’d have to go into town to fix whatever was messing their computers up.

***

“Are you sure you had it set up right?” Natalya asked. “They don’t exactly teach you about combines at NASA.”

Brock clenched his jaw in silence. This was the second slight he’d had about his past in as many days, and it was growing tiresome. He was a farmer. The world needed farmers. The land needed farmers.

Natalya seemed to interpret this correctly, since she shrugged an apology. “Could be a loose wire,” she said, tone doubtful.

“All twelve?”

“No, probably not. You say they were acting erratic?”

Brock nodded. “Got onto Bliss land. Caused her problems.”

Natalya laughed. “And you’re sure that wasn’t on purpose?” she asked. “God knows I’d love to give her a day as hard as she’s made some of mine sometimes.”

Brock didn’t reply.

“It’ll be two thousand for a Claas system, if you want to replace the one you brought me,” Natalya said.

Brock looked down at the chunky screen and its mess of wires in his hand. “No good replacing just the one.”

“How about your lead combine? Fixing the vehicle to vehicle communications on that could do the trick.”

Brock shook his head. “She’s not a Claas.”

Natalya looked exasperated at him; tired of this city slicker, tired of the dust, tired of eating corn for so long she could no longer remember the taste of any other food, tired of this conversation that felt like she was having it with a brick wall. “Lesnar, you know we can’t be picky for parts these days. The Michigan plants were all shut down, they’ll be opened up again someday but it’s not soon and everyone’s farming. It’s not like before. You and the Charlotte have been jimmmyrigging Deere heads to New Holland bodies around here for over a decade now, just take the damn computer. Blake or Murphy will help you install it if you can’t figure out how, they’re good boys.”

They sure as hell were not good boys, they wouldn’t have known what to do with straw if a bale spike bit them on the ass. Brock didn’t voice his concerns. There was no point in arguing with the manager of the farming goods store, not when his rotor grates would need replacing in a few months time and he’d want to get ones that wasn’t too worn yet. It was true, most of his combines were Frankenstein mashups of different brands; all it took was a keen eye to know the right fits for the right engines, he and Flair were both known around town as being the ones to go to for technical prowess. The metal talked to Brock, it told him what it wanted.

His Gleaner didn’t want a new computer.

The store owner sighed, handing her cardboard box of GPSes back to her husband, who was stocking the shelves. He’d fallen into a thresher a year ago, but had recovered from his injuries so well one would never know it. Brock respected that. “Well if you’re not buying, try checking all their roofs,” she suggested finally. “It’s possible their receivers got dislodged during the last dust storm, maybe a tree fell on them or something.”

No trees around here, no tall ones at least. But Brock nodded, and left her alone.

***

He dusted off the roof of the seventh combine: no bent antennae yet, but Brock was slow, methodical. When Nia had been here she’d joked that Brock did everything at the same speed as a tectonic plate, but when she’d explained the meaning to him all he’d done was nod. The earth knew the rate it was meant to move at; what was the point in trying to outstrip it? Brock didn’t have anywhere to be other than here. He was careful in his work.

So careful, in fact, that he almost didn’t notice the shadow passing overhead. He did hear the hum though, and it’s what made him look up.

Some kind of military drone was falling out of the sky, straight for the Bliss house.

Blake was standing outside and saw it at the same instant that Brock did. “Mom!” he yelled, running for the door. “Mom, there’s a plane!”

A second later, there was a loud bang, and buckshot rained down over the ground like hailstones. The drone swerved off to the side; she’d got it in the wing and knocked it off course into a distant field.

“Blake! Murph! Got some scrap metal for you!” Her eyes fell on Brock’s watching ones. “What?” she spat, shotgun cradled in the crook of her arm.

He gave a neighbourly wave, and continued his work, not appreciating the accusatory glare that seemed to imply _he_ was somehow responsible for decades-old military drones falling out of the sky. Best not to talk back to a person with a shotgun in their hand though. Just carry on working.

***

It was sunset by the time he finished all the combines, resetting them once more for good measure and sending them on their way. The Bliss boys had dragged in the last of the drone on their truck, coughing as they lifted it down. Some good solar panels on that. A windfall, really. Brock shut the door tight to keep out the varmit and the dust, then made his way up the dark stair to his quiet bedroom.

In the night, around three AM, he was woken by a noise, a steady rumbling. It rumbled at the same frequency as his bones, as his heart, but he opened the window to look anyway. There was his Gleaner, all fourteen tonnes of her, looking alien and silver in the quiet moonlight. She hovered by the front porch, idling patiently.

Brock got up. He put on a thicker flannel shirt and warm pants. It was cool out at night. The combine waited for him while he made a thermos of corn chowder and got some jerry cans of diesel from the shed.

He stood beside her for a second, resting a hand flat on the side of the cab. He’d had this combine for nearly twenty years now. She never acted up.

The steel was warm under his palm.

She must know something. Normally Brock knew everything his tools did; it was symbiosis, with them, with the crops, with the land. But this time she knew something he didn’t. He was going to listen.

He pulled himself into the driver’s cabin, piled his supplies by his feet, and wrapped a thick, canvas blanket around himself. Reaching forward, he reset the controller. The opening screen was bright in the pale moonlight, nearly burning his eyes, but soon switched to a blurry green-and-blue image of the continent, then zooming in closer and closer until it neared its home position. It stopped on a much larger scale than normal, showing a far greater territory than the farm and its surroundings. The ‘home’ coordinates were set to that far-away mark in the middle of nowhere once again.

Brock set the tracks for maximum terrain adaptability; they were going as the crow flies. He pressed a few buttons, and she lurched forward at her full six miles per hour. Brock nodded, then settled down in his seat for a long nap.

***

**Author's Note:**

> Sanidine, you are to blame for literally every aspect of this story.
> 
> I was going to wait and end the chapter a little later on when more characters had been introduced, but I’m having too much fun to hold this back anymore, I’m so excited to share it with the world! If “Brock Lesnar meditating at length about farming” isn’t your thing, I _promise_ there will be actual other characters like, a hundred words from now, okay? Please just bear with me on this, it started as a joke but I’m genuinely so thrilled to write everything that’s coming. 
> 
> (Also I tried to be good on my harvester knowledge, but if my research is wrong/you know more about farming than me, PLEASE TELL ME EVERYTHING YOU KNOW I WOULD LOVE TO HEAR ABOUT IT I WOULD DEARLY LOVE THAT!)


End file.
